Political ad buyers have tried to get candidates to switch from a reliance on old-school TV to a more streaming-centric approach.
As in: Please, give CTV a try already.
On Tuesday, Comscore’s programmatic ad targeting division, Proximic, which launched earlier this year, unveiled new audience segments for political advertisers running presidential, congressional and gubernatorial election campaigns. The new audience segments are only available through The Trade Desk (at least for now).
The point is to help political advertisers reach people based on what they watch and the political campaigns they’ve already seen, said Rachel Gantz, managing director of Proximic.
TV viewership is another indicator of a viewer’s political beliefs, sometimes even a superior indicator than voter registration or location data, which are often inaccurate. And targeting based on ad exposure allows buyers to manage frequency and incremental reach between linear and streaming, or to target viewers who saw a competing candidate’s ad.
Programmatic companies and digital ad buyers need each other’s help to convince political buyers to invest in streaming when those candidates start to spend big on persuasion ads (the classic 30-second campaign spot), said Kevin Fisher, general manager of business development at The Trade Desk.
You are what you watch
Proximic’s new segments are built on Comscore’s set-top box data and automatic content recognition.
Advertisers can plan CTV and online video audiences based on the news outlets they watch, which can be a good indicator of their political standing. Republicans, for example, are more likely to get their news from sources such as Fox News or “The Daily Caller,” whereas Democrats prefer CNN and HuffPost, according to Pew Research Center.
Whereas a Republican candidate wouldn’t waste money reaching viewers that lean heavily to the left, they might have a good chance swaying a moderate or swing voter.
And streaming video buys give advertisers a better chance of reaching the right voters in the right places, unlike linear broadcasts, which often cross state or district lines and thus create a ton of waste in the media spend.
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When Governor Glenn Youngkin, R-Va., was running for office before his election last year, for example, “I kept seeing his ads constantly, and I didn’t even have a chance to vote for him because I live in Maryland,” Fisher said.
Political advertisers using the new segments on The Trade Desk can also manage reach and frequency between linear and streaming. Even though buys on The Trade Desk are exclusively for streaming and digital (not linear), linear ad exposures indicate which audiences are being underexposed or missed entirely, Fisher said.
Exploring new turf
But the primary use case (pun unintended) for political advertisers will be to get in front of viewers who saw ads for their competitors.
Conquesting tactics are no longer limited to ecommerce and pizza brands. Political candidates have a tight time crunch ahead of Election Day to convince viewers to vote – and to vote for them.
For example, as next year’s Super Tuesday primary elections creep closer, Gantz said, most of the competition will be among candidates of the same party jockeying for the nomination.
And once candidates are narrowed down, it makes sense for opposing parties to compete against each other by going after moderates and swing voters. Everyone wants to reach swing voters, Fisher said, so expect “a lot of competitive conquesting to mobilize voters to the ballet box [with a bigger] share of voice.”
The Trade Desk plans to measure performance with the new segments based on surveys and polls, Comscore ratings and other metrics it typically uses for digital campaigns, such as view-through rate and cost per completed view.
For now, the new product is for political candidates, but “we do expect this to have a halo effect among advertisers more generally [because] brands are looking to connect meaningfully with consumers on different political issues,” Gantz said.
Advertisers looking to resonate with consumers who care about movements such as women’s health or LGBTQ+ rights might base their buys on the types of news outlets viewers watch, for example.
Linear TV still commands most of political advertisers’ attention right now, Gantz said, but the potential for better targeting is why “CTV is becoming increasingly more important” to their media plans.
